Weekly recap: 2023-11-26

Posted by Q McCallum on 2023-11-26

What you see here is the last week’s worth of links and quips I have shared on LinkedIn, from Monday through Sunday.

For now I’ll post the notes as they appeared on LinkedIn, including hashtags and sentence fragments. Over time I might expand on these thoughts as they land here on my blog.

2023/11/20: Third-party risk, redux

People often assume that risk management is about saying “no” to everything. That’s quite far from the truth. Risk management is about looking ahead and checking around corners, so you can stay on-track. Case in point:

Back in July I published a short piece called “Generative AI, APIs, and third-party risk” (which appeared on the Gray Rhino blog a few weeks later).

The post highlighted a risk associated with the growing popularity of generative AI services: if that vendor gets knocked out, or if they suddenly change their services, any products you’ve built on their APIs could suffer.

Fast-forward to the present day. OpenAI, parent company of ChatGPT, has shuffled its leadership and many team members threaten to walk out as a result. This corporate drama introduces big question marks for any company that has built on ChatGPT or other OpenAI services.

So what do you do?

  • For the companies that performed an AI risk assessment early on: you’re all set. You identified “OpenAI might hit rough waters” as a potential threat and formulated your contingency plans. You’re ready for what comes next and may even not feel much impact.
  • For the companies that were caught unawares by this turn of events: you’re in chaos. You have to sort out what to do while under time pressure. This is not a good place to be, but it’s where you are.

If you’re asking yourself what other risks linger in your company’s AI projects, I can help. Due diligence and risk assessments have long been on the menu: https://qethanm.cc/consulting/